The existence of the King’s Chamber shafts was first recorded by Dr. John Greaves, a British astronomer, in 1636. It was not until 1837, however, that they were investigated thoroughly—by Colonel Howard Vyse with the assistance of two civil engineers, John Perring and James Mash. Another member of Vyse’s team was Mr. J. R. Hill, an obscure Englishman living in Cairo, who in May of 1837 was put in charge of clearing the mouth of the southern shaft (which emerges at the 102nd course of masonry on the south face of the Pyramid). In accord with Vyse’s methods elsewhere, Hill was instructed to use explosives and was thus responsible for the ugly vertical scar which may be seen to this day running up the centre of the south side of the Great Pyramid.
On Friday, 26 May 1837, after a couple of days of blasting and clearing, Hill discovered the flat iron plate mentioned above. Vyse was soon afterwards to trumpet it in his monumental opus, Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh as ‘the oldest piece of wrought iron known’,[203] but Hill at the time was content to write up the discovery in the proper, sober manner:
This is to certify that the piece of iron found by me near the mouth of the air-passage [shaft], in the southern side of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, on Friday, May 20th, was taken out by me from an inner joint, after having removed by blasting the two outer tiers of the stones of the present surface of the Pyramid; and that no joint or opening of any sort was connected with the above mentioned joint, by which the iron could have been placed in it after the original building of the Pyramid. I also shewed the exact spot to Mr. Perring, on Saturday, June 24th.[204]
John Perring, a civil engineer, thus examined the exact spot of the find. With him was James Mash, also a civil engineer, and both were ‘of the opinion that the iron must have been left in the joint during the building of the Pyramid, and that it could not have been inserted afterwards’.[205] Ultimately Vyse sent the mysterious artefact, together with the certifications of Hill, Perring and Mash, to the British Museum. There, from the outset, the general feeling was that it could not be a genuine piece, because wrought iron was unknown in the Pyramid Age, and that it must therefore have been ‘introduced’ in much more recent times.
In 1881 the plate was re-examined by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie who found it difficult, for a variety of cogent reasons, to agree with this analysis:
Though some doubt has been thrown on the piece, merely from its rarity, [he noted] yet the vouchers for it are very precise; and it has a cast of a nummulite [fossilized marine protozoa] on the rust of it, proving it to have been buried for ages beside a block of nummulitic limestone, and therefore to be certainly ancient. No reasonable doubt can therefore exist about its being a really genuine piece ...[206]
Despite this forceful opinion from one of the oddball giants of Egyptology in the late Victorian Age, the profession as a whole has been unable to cope with the idea of a piece of wrought iron being contemporary with the Great Pyramid. Such a notion goes completely against the grain of every preconception that Egyptologists internalize throughout their careers concerning the ways in which civilizations evolve and develop.
Scientific analysis
Because of these preoccupations, no further investigations of any significance were undertaken into the iron plate for another 108 years and it was not until 1989 that a fragment from it was at last subjected to rigorous optical and chemical tests. The scientists responsible for the work were Dr. M. P. Jones, Senior Tutor in the Mineral Resources Engineering Department at Imperial College, London, and his colleague Dr. Sayed El Gayer, a lecturer in the Faculty of Petroleum and Mining at Egypt’s Suez University, who gained his Ph.D. in extraction metallurgy at the University of Aston in Birmingham.[207]
They began their study by checking on the nickel content of the iron plate. Their reason for doing this was to exclude the faint possibility that it might have been manufactured from meteoritic iron (i.e. iron from fallen meteorites—a material that is known, very rarely, to have been used during the Pyramid Age). Ready-made meteoritic iron of this sort, however, is always extremely easy to identify because it invariably contains a significant proportion of nickel—typically seven per cent or more.[208] On the basis of their first test Jones and El Gayer noted: ‘The iron plate from Giza is clearly not of meteoritic origin, since it contains only a trace of nickel.’ The metal, therefore, was man-made. But how had it been made?
Further tests proved that it had been smelted at a temperature between 1000 and 1100 degrees centigrade. These tests also picked up the odd fact that there were ‘traces of gold on one face of the iron plate’.[209] Perhaps, Jones and El Gayer speculated, it might originally have been ‘gold-plated, and this gold may be an indication that this artefact ... was held in great esteem when it was produced’.[210]
Finally, when was it produced?
After completing an extremely careful and detailed study, the two metallurgists reported as follows: ‘It is concluded, on the basis of the present investigation, that the iron plate is very ancient. Furthermore, the metallurgical evidence supports the archaeological evidence which suggests that the plate was incorporated within the Pyramid at the time that structure was being built.’[211]
When Jones and El Gayer submitted their findings to the British Museum, they were in for quite a surprise. Instead of being excited, officials fobbed them off: ‘The structure of the iron plate is unusual,’ conceded Paul Craddock and Janet Lang. ‘We are not sure of the significance or origin of this structure but it is not necessarily indicative of great age.’[212]
The British Museum’s view
Because the iron plate appeared to have been removed originally from within or near the mouth of the King’s Chamber’s ‘Orion’ shaft it was of great interest to us. We decided to take a look at it. Through Dr. A. J. Spencer, Assistant Curator of the Egyptian Antiquities Department at the British Museum, we arranged a viewing on 7 November 1993. We were permitted to handle the plate and were intrigued by its unusual weight and texture. We could also hardly fail to notice that under its surface patina the internal metal possessed a brilliant shine—which was revealed at the point where the fragment had been cleanly sliced off for El Gayer’s and Jones’s analysis. Dr. Spencer repeated the British Museum’s official line—that the plate was not old but had been introduced, probably deliberately, in Vyse’s time—and that El Gayer and Jones’s conclusions were ‘highly dubious’.[213]
How and why could the conclusions of such eminent metallurgists be deemed ‘highly dubious’, we asked?
Dr. Spencer had no answer and Dr. Craddock, whom we spoke to on the phone, did not wish to elaborate.
A few days later we called Dr. M. P. Jones and heard from him how he and Dr. El Gayer had examined the plate in the laboratories at Imperial College London in 1989. Dr. Jones is now retired and lives in Wales. When we asked him what he thought of the British Museum’s view of his conclusions he was, understandably, rather irritated. He insisted that the iron plate was ‘very old’ and, like us, he felt—since there were two opposing views—that the best way to resolve this matter would be further testing in an independent laboratory.
After all, the implications of man-made iron in 2500 bc are tremendous. And this isn’t just a matter of redating the so-called Iron Age. Perhaps in a way more intriguing are the questions raised as to the function that an iron plate might have had, inside the southern shaft of the main chamber in the Great Pyramid, many thousands of years ago. Could there be a relationship between this plate and the stone portcullis door with copper ‘handles’ that Rudolf Gantenbrink had so recently discovered at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber—a shaft directed to ‘Sirius-Isis’, the consort of ‘Orion-Osiris’?
In their 1989 report, El Gayer and Jones noted that the plate was probably a fragment coming from a larger piece which might originally have composed a square plate that would have fitted, like a sort of ‘gate’, neatly over the mouth of the shaft.
Stargate
In later chapters we will make de
tailed reference to the so-called ‘Pyramid Texts’ of ancient Egypt. These texts take the form of extensive funerary and rebirth inscriptions carved on the tomb walls of certain Fifth—and Sixth-Dynasty pyramids at Saqqara, about ten miles south of Giza. Egyptologists agree that much if not all of the content of the inscriptions predates the Pyramid Age.[214] It is thus unsettling to discover in these ancient scriptures, supposedly the work of neolithic farmers who had hardly even begun to master copper, that there are abundant references to iron.
The name given to it is B’ja—‘the divine metal’—and we always encounter it in distinctive contexts related in one way or another to astronomy, to the stars and to the gods.[215] For example B’ja is frequently mentioned in the texts in connection with the ‘four sons of Horus’—presumably related in some way to strange beings called the Shemsu Hor, the ‘Followers of Horus’ and ‘Transfigured Ones’, whom we shall also be discussing in later chapters. At any rate, these very mysterious ‘sons of Horus’ seem to have been made of iron or to have had iron fingers: ‘Your children’s children together have raised you up, namely [the four sons of Horus] ... your mouth is split open with their iron fingers ...’[216]
Iron is also mentioned in the texts as being necessary for the construction of a bizarre instrument called a Meshtyw. Very much resembling a carpenter’s adze or cutting tool, this was a ceremonial device which was used to ‘strike open the mouth’ of the deceased Pharaoh’s mummified and embalmed corpse—an indispensable ritual if the Pharaoh’s soul were to be re-awakened to eternal life amidst the cycles of the stars.
In the Pyramid Texts we thus find a high priest making this cryptic statement:
Your mouth is in good order for I split open your mouth for you ... O king, I open your mouth for you with the adze of iron of Upuaut, I split open your mouth for you with the adze of iron which split open the mouths of the gods ... Horus has split open the mouth of this king with that wherewith he split open the mouth of his father, with that wherewith he split open the mouth of Osiris ...[217]
From such utterances, and many more like them, it is clear that iron was somehow seen by the composers of the Pyramid Texts as being imperative in the rituals aimed at ensuring new life—cosmic and stellar life—to the dead king. More importantly the above verse also connects the metal and its uses to the ancient prototype of all such rituals by means of which Osiris himself, Egypt’s ‘Once and Future King’, died and was then restored to immortal life as Lord of the sky-region of Orion. This region, as we shall see in Part III, was known as the Duat. In it all the Pharaohs of Egypt hoped that they would reside eternally after their own deaths:
The gate of the earth is open for you ... may a stairway to the Duat be set up for you to the place where Orion is ...[218]
O king ... the sky conceives you with Orion ... the sky has borne you with Orion ...[219]
O king, be a soul like a living star ...[220]
The gate of the earth-god is open ... may you remove yourself to the sky and sit upon your iron throne ...[221]
The aperture of the sky window is opened for you ...[222]
The doors of iron which are in the starry sky are thrown open for me, and I go through them ...[223]
What seems to be envisaged here, taken literally and reduced to the basic common denominators running through all the above utterances, appears to be nothing less than an iron ‘stargate’ intended to admit Osiris, and all the dynasties of dead kings after him, into the celestial realms of the belt of Orion. But if the Pyramid Texts are describing a stargate then they are also describing a timegate—for they express no doubt that by passing through the iron-doored portals of the sky the soul of the deceased will attain a life of millions of years, navigating eternity in the vessels of the gods. Naturally, therefore, by virtue of its original position at or near the end of the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber, we are tempted to wonder whether the neglected iron plate in the British Museum might have been connected with such amazingly sophisticated concepts and beliefs about immortality and about the ability of ‘the equipped spirit’ to gain a complete mastery over death and time.
We wonder, too, what might have been the function of other mysterious objects that were discovered in the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber when these were first opened in 1872 by Waynman Dixon, an enterprising engineer from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Unknown dark distance
Unlike the King’s Chamber shafts, those in the Queen’s Chamber (a) do not exit on the outside of the monument and (b) were not originally cut through the chamber’s limestone walls. Instead the builders left the last five inches intact in the last block over the mouth of each of the shafts—thus rendering them invisible and inaccessible to any casual intruder.
The reader will recall the mention of Charles Piazzi Smyth and his prophetic theories about the Great Pyramid at the start of this chapter. In the early 1860s, when he was formulating these theories, he befriended a certain William Petrie, an engineer, whose son, W. M. Flinders Petrie, was later to be universally acclaimed as the founder of the academic discipline of Egyptology.[224]
William Petrie was amongst the first ‘Pyramidologists’ of the Victorian Age to give strong support to Piazzi Smyth’s notion that the Great Pyramid might be some sort of prophetic monument to Mankind encoding a Messianic blueprint designed to serve as an advance-warning mechanism for the ‘Second Coming’ of Christ.[225] ‘There had been a time’, wrote Professor Hermann Bruck and Dr. Mary Bruck in their authoritative biography of the Astronomer Royal, ‘when Flinders Petrie and his father had wholeheartedly concurred with most of Piazzi Smyth’s ideas.’[226] Indeed as these two eminent astronomers and authors point out, the young Flinders Petrie set out to Egypt in 1880 on his famous study of the Great Pyramid precisely because he wanted to ‘continue Piazzi Smyth’s work’.[227]
Returning now to the shafts in the Queen’s Chamber, we were interested to learn that their discoverer, the engineer Waynman Dixon—together with his brother John—had also maintained very close ties with Piazzi Smyth. Indeed, it had been through the Astronomer Royal’s direct influence that the Dixons were able to explore the Great Pyramid in 1872 and discover the previously concealed entrances to the northern and southern star-shafts in the Queen’s Chamber.[228]
Waynman Dixon’s curiosity had been aroused by the shafts in the King’s Chamber which provoked him to look for similar features in the Queen’s Chamber. This search, which took place some time early in 1872, was undertaken with the full knowledge of Piazzi Smyth, who later described the whole matter in his book. The story goes that after noticing a crack in the southern wall of the Queen’s Chamber—roughly where he thought that he might find shafts—Waynman Dixon set his ‘carpenter and man-of-all-work’, a certain Bill Grundy ‘to jump a hole with a hammer and steel chisel at that place. So to work the faithful fellow went, and with a will which soon began to make a way into the soft stone at this point when lo! after a comparatively very few strokes, flop went the chisel right through into something or other.’[229]
The ‘something or other’ Bill Grundy’s chisel had reached turned out to be ‘a rectangular, horizontal, tubular channel, about 9 inches by 8 inches in transverse breadth and height, going back 7 feet into the wall, and then rising at an angle into an unknown dark distance ...’[230]
This was the southern shaft.
Next, measuring off a similar position on the north wall, Waynman Dixon ‘set the invaluable Bill Grundy to work there with his hammer and steel chisel; and again, after a very little labour, flop went the said chisel through into somewhere; which somewhere was presently found to be a horizontal pipe or channel of transverse proportions like the other, and, at a distance within the masonry of 7 feet, rising at a similar angle, but in the opposite direction, and trending indefinitely far ...’[231]
Together with his brother John, Waynman Dixon made efforts to probe both the northern and southern shafts—using a jointed rod, something like a chimney-sweep’s rod, for this pu
rpose.[232] Late-nineteenth-century technology was not up to the job and a segment of the rod became wedged in the northern shaft, where it still remains.[233] Before this happened, however, the Dixons found three small relics in the shafts.
33. Detail of Queen’s Chamber shaft.
These objects—a rough stone sphere, a small two-pronged hook made out of some form of metal, and a fine piece of cedar wood some 12 centimetres long with strange notches cut into it[234]—were exported from Egypt in the summer of 1872 and arrived safely in England a few weeks later.[235] During the next year or so they were commented upon in books, and even illustrated in scientific and popular magazines such as Nature and the London Graphic.[236] Before the turn of the century, however, they had disappeared.[237]
Links
A curious series of links exists involving all of the following:
• the discovery of the Queen’s Chamber shafts with their constituent relics;
• the formation of the Egyptian Exploration Society (the EES, British Egyptology’s most prestigious organization);
• the foundation, at University College, London, of Egyptology’s most prestigious Chair;
• British Freemasonry.
In 1872, whilst the Dixon brothers were exploring the Great Pyramid, a well-known Freemason and parliamentarian, Sir James Alexander, proposed a motion to bring to Britain the incorrectly named ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’—a 200-ton obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmosis III which had originally been erected some 3500 years ago in the sacred city of Heliopolis.[238] Funding for the project came from the personal fortune of another Freemason, the eminent British dermatologist, Sir Erasmus Wilson,[239] and Sir James Alexander recommended that the civil engineer John Dixon—also a Freemason—should be engaged to collect the obelisk from Egypt. On this basis Sir Erasmus Wilson promptly recruited John Dixon—and also his brother, Waynman, who was then living in Egypt.[240]